2023-07-04 20:05:10
The American singer and guitarist, member of the group Drive Like Jehu, died on June 30, at the age of 55.
He was one of the most instantly recognizable and powerfully electrifying voices on the American indie scene. Like a tire screeching, a continuous skid, the asthmatic cry of a guy whose skin had been torn off, before two handfuls of gravel were thrown down his throat. A figure both terribly intense and voluntarily erased, Rick Froberg had been known since the early 90s as one of the pillars of the very prolific San Diego scene. Singer of the cult Pitchfork and especially of Drive Like Jehu, reference of post-hardcore, this genre leading the most extreme and virulent formations of the US punk scene to slow down the tempo, to embark on long superstructured riffolades, to use and abuse one of those guitars that sounded as if they were digging minefields, among which a desperate voice was trying to make itself heard – Froberg’s, howling as if moving against the wind. The story of Drive Like Jehu will be dry, brief, scathing – two essential discs, a first in 1991, historic, and the stunning Yank Crime in 1994, a tomb disc like so many at the time, sprinkled judged by a major who signed everything that stood up and made a minimum of noise, in the wake of the monster success of Nirvana and the advent of so-called “alternative” rock.
Thereafter, Froberg would change brands but not teams – he would never stray far from John Reis, another San Diego mainstay, frontman of the flamboyant Rocket From the Crypt, on guitars in Pitchfork and Drive Like Jehu and who will continue to support him in Hot Snakes, a more direct and airy version of Drive Like Jehu, with a less resounding reputation but more notable commercial success. Graphic designer and illustrator in the city, he will sign the covers and visuals of all his groups – to which must be added the excellent Obits, the latest project to date, launched at the end of the 2000s – and those of dozens of others, including the Canadians from the Metz group or the French 12XU.
A quiet legend, able to walk through a concert hall unrecognized by his own audience, hidden behind a boilerplate look that in recent years has made him look like a cross between Thurston Moore and Mark Lanegan. Someone, above all, who let glimpse, by dint of long rasping howls, a formidable conflagration, source of obsession and major inspiration for several generations of musicians, from indie-rock to hardcore. Rick Froberg died of natural causes on June 30. He was 55 years old.
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